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Yeonmi Park is the North Korean girl who featured on episode #1691 of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast on August 3, 2021. Park is a North Korean defector who fled the country in 2007 when she was just 13.
Since escaping, Yeonmi Park has become a human rights activist, advocating for the North Korean people. Her memoir titled In Order to Live: A North Korean Girl's Journey to Freedom was published in 2015.
Park moved to the United States in 2014. She also became a member of LINK, a US non-profit organisation that rescues North Korean refugees residing in China. She was also featured on BBC 100 women in 2014.
Park and her mother escaped from North Korea through human traffickers who smuggled North Korean women to China. Speaking to Joe Rogan, she explained the events leading up to their escape.
Though it was Park and her sister who initially planned to escape together, she later found out that her sister had left without her. Park and her mother then decided to make the trip themselves with the help of a woman who had connections to human traffickers.
She told Rogan that they couldn't even inform her father of their escape.
"The tragic thing for North Koreans is that we can't even say goodbye to our loved ones. So if we got caught on our journey and my father knew we were escaping. He is going to be punished so much. So it was better off that he does not know that we were escaping."
Watch the JRE clip below:
Yeonmi Park tells Joe Rogan of her experience with human traffickers
On his podcast, Joe Rogan asked North Korean defector Yeonmi Park about her mother being raped by human traffickers who were transporting them to China. Explaining the horrific incident, Park said:
"I didn't even know that was sex. I didn't even know that was rape because we didn't have the vocabulary in North Korea... I just thought something I was seeing was horrible. But later they told me that was rape. I did not know that was rape."
She told Rogan that the Chinese government was repatriating defectors from North Korea. Park expressed that this act by China was further enabling human traffickers to exploit these women.
"We are vulnerable right. We are running away from the Chinese authorities. So even they [human traffickers] rape us and kill us, because the last place we are going to go is go to the police and report on them"
Watch the full episode on Spotify below:
